Ouch. Ouch. And Double-Ouch! It seems the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) is finally getting nailed for its endlessly mendacious memo about Social Security privatization. You'll remember that this is the memo in which the NRCC instructed GOP House candidates to bully reporters out of using the term 'privatization' to describe 
Republican policy on Social Security reform, claiming the label was a misleading slur concocted by Democrats, when in fact it was the term all Republicans used until a few months ago.
Today Paul Krugman called them on it in the Times. This afternoon Tim Noah called them on it in Slate.
But perhaps most damning was a piece published on Wednesday by Ramesh Ponnuru in National Review Online ...
The Republican memo is a piece of brazen historical revisionism. It pretends that the word "privatization" was invented by Democratic spinners and then accepted by a gullible media. It makes no mention of the incontrovertible fact that "privatization" was the term used by many Republican (and other) advocates of personal accounts until it turned out that the word didn't poll well.
Now Ponnuru does argue that 'privatization' isn't really the best label to describe what Republicans want to do. It wouldn't be so bad, he says, if the NRCC flaks had "written a memo saying that a lot of people, including themselves, had carelessly used the word 'privatization' in the past but that it should henceforth be avoided by all participants in the Social Security debate."
So Ponnuru thinks 'privatization' isn't the best label. But he frankly identifies the rank dishonesty of the NRCC's memo.
Now, there area a few other points I've learned since writing about this earlier this week. This isn't the first time the NRCC has tried this scam. They tried it less energetically in May with a similar (or perhaps identical) memo. And The New Republic called them on it then. What's more, NRCC Chairman Tom Davis went on Meet the Press last Sunday, following up on the August 26th memo. And it seems that once you really get your 'lying about Social Security' groove on, it just comes really easy. Davis said, among other things, that "President Clinton embraced [private accounts] at one point as you recall." In this universe at least, that never happened. (A nice breakdown of Davis' Meet the Press appearance can be found here if you scroll down a bit.)
I don't like the frivolous use of the word 'lie' for what are merely misstatements or exaggerations. It's a cutting and harsh word. But these are lies. They are multiple and repeated and intentional. And they all come from NRCC Chairman Tom Davis -- who might fairly be called the Vin Diesel of public policy mendacity, or the first practitioner of Extreme spin -- or his subordinates.
Now, these recent zinging mentions by columnists are like so many banderillas, those innocuous but enraging beribboned darts that a matador ceremoniously slips into the bull's neck before he really lets him have it.
So the question is, which daily reporter with access to Davis will ask him what credibility he can possibly have on Social Security -- or anything else, for that matter -- when he has presided over a campaign of what liberals and conservatives both agree are lies.
--Josh Marshall
I find it hard to imagine that this new revelation won't end Benjamin Netanyahu's political career once and for all. A tape has emerged in which Netanyahu's wife Sara tells another Likud activist, inter alia, "Bibi is a leader who is greater than this entire country, he really is a leader on a national scale. We'll move abroad. This country can burn. This country can't survive without Bibi. People here will be slaughtered."
--Josh Marshall
"Where does the Times' confession leave its outright defenders, like Marshall and John Judis?" asks Mickey Kaus. Honestly? I'd say it leaves Judis and me with more self-respect than the news page editors at the Times.
It's always irksome to lean in to 
defend someone who's wrongly accused, only to see them buckle and beg forgiveness because they can't stand the heat. But that's precisely what's happened here. Say what you want about the Times, or anti-regime change bias, whatever. The Tyler/Purdum article's characterization of Kissinger was right on target. I've explained why several times already so I won't do it again here. (For a really good explanation see this new article by John Judis.)
In fact, see how Fox News of all places reported Kissinger's OpEd just a couple days after it ran -- that is, before the conservative party line got drawn up. They reported it just the same way as the Times did.
Even the Times' mea culpa has a touch of comedy in it since the editors seem to strain to find something to apologize for. The key passage reads like one of those loopy show trial moments when the victim has utterly given up the fight, can't wait to admit to something, but can't quite figure out what to confess to. So he looks inquiringly at his accuser for some hint or lead as to what crime he's supposed to cop to. It's about as uplifting as watching a black-eyed wife tearfully apologize to her husband after he beats her up.
Times critics can jump up and down like monkeys because of their victory. And it is a victory: the Times caved. (They now refuse to report even the fact that Kissinger supports the inspectors-first approach.) But that doesn't alter the essential dishonesty of the attack. Kissinger dissents from key aspects of White House policy like inspections and he's a supporter of White House policy. Powell dissents on the same grounds but he's a dissenter who should be sent packing.
Kissinger's critique was different from Scowcroft's. But then Tyler and Purdum said it was different. But it turns out, says the Times mea culpa, they "should have made a clearer distinction between [Kissinger's] views and those of Mr. Scowcroft." Tyler and Purdum's error apparently was insufficient special-pleading on behalf of the neo-conservatives and warhawks.
The issue here of course isn't Kissinger. Who cares what Kissinger thinks about Iraq? But who knew it would be so easy for a few conservative columnists and their yahoos-in-waiting to bitch-slap the Times into saying that up is down or humiliate two good reporters who zigged when the neos were demanding a zag?
--Josh Marshall
The new administration line is that Vice-President Dick Cheney was off the reservation last week when he said that inspections in Iraq were an irrelevancy. Andy Card apparently told Howard Fineman on the record that Cheney was freelancing when he ruled out inspections.
If this were true you would really have to marvel at the collision of incompetence and humiliation that would require the White House Chief of Staff to tell a reporter on the record on the president's behalf that the vice-president 
had made a statement that the president neither authorized nor agreed with.
The key part of that sentence, however, is 'if this were true.' Because it's pretty clearly not true. I can't tell you what was authorized or who said what to whom. Maybe the president didn't 'authorize' Cheney's remarks, whatever that might mean. But the premise of Card's remarks is bogus. Cheney didn't break any new ground in his remarks on inspectors. On the contrary, the irrelevance and insufficiency of weapons inspections has been administration policy for some time. The point has been stated repeatedly by Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and various other administration appointees.
This may be an embarrassment for the administration's slip-n-slide policy on Iraq. But it won't do to peg it on Cheney. This is just clumsy damage control, an effort to make sense of the fact that the vice-president and the Secretary of State flatly contradicted each other on the central point of the president's foreign policy agenda in less than a week.
Consider the administration's conceit: the president's leadership is so vaunted, they say, that when he makes up his mind the allies, who oppose us, will support us. The public, which is ambivalent, will overwhelmingly endorse his policy. But how will he bend the world to his will when he can't even get his own cabinet secretaries to endorse his policy?
--Josh Marshall
Did the neos get the Times to buckle on the Henry Kissinger question?
When last we visited the deepest recesses of conservative media criticism insiderdom, a gaggle of neo-conservatives were charging the New York Times with bias against the president's Iraq policy. Their prime evidence was a series of Times' articles portraying Henry Kissinger as a critic of the president's policy when, in fact, said the neos, he was a supporter. This of course was based on an earlier Kissinger OpEd in the Washington Post.
Today's Times' article on Colin Powell by James Dao says Powell ...
believes that Mr. Bush should first press for a new round of weapons inspections and then seek international support for invasion plans. That view has recently been endorsed by three Republican foreign policy experts: former Secretaries of State James A. Baker III and Lawrence S. Eagleburger, and former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft.
Now, as I argued earlier, I think the neos were simply wrong on this. To the extent that there is legitimate disagreement that's because the shadings of Iraq policy can be rather subtle and even more because Kissinger's column was laughably clotted and hedged and meant to give almost everyone something to grab on to.
But if Kissinger cavilled and hedged -- I'm sorry, qualified and explained -- on a lot of things, inspections policy wasn't one of them. He explicitly endorsed precisely what Powell is saying with regard to inspectors. Hell, even Fox News -- before the party-line got established -- could see that. Let's go to the tape, or rather, the text of Kissinger's column ...
the objective of regime change should be subordinated in American declaratory policy to the need to eliminate weapons of mass destruction from Iraq as required by the UN resolutions. The restoration of the inspection system existing before its expulsion by Saddam is clearly inadequate. It is necessary to propose a stringent inspection system that achieves substantial transparency of Iraq institutions. Since the consequences of simply letting the diplomacy run into the ground are so serious, a time limit should be set. The case for military intervention will then have been made in the context of seeking a common approach.
At any major metropolitan newspaper the details of a particular story will often reflect the information the given reporter had at hand rather than the paper's broader editorial line. But Iraq's a big issue. And this Kissinger matter has gotten a lot of attention. It's hard to see how this telling omission just slipped through. Much easier to imagine that the Times just got rolled.
--Josh Marshall
"You also mentioned what you call 'privatization' of Social Security," CNN anchor Judy Woodruff told House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt in an interview last Thursday. "The Republicans are crying foul. Your counterpart running the campaigns for the Republicans in the House are (sic) saying the Democrats are being false. They're being misleading, that they are not talking about privatizing Social Security."
We've previously noted how easy it usually is for conservatives to bully reporters with charges of media bias. There's a mix of poor judgment, poor memory, insecurity and low-grade cowardice which makes this possible -- a messy collision of conservative self-pity and journalistic self-loathing. But let's set aside that deeper issue for a moment to look at a particularly revealing example of the phenomenon.
Both parties try to tag their opponents' policies with phrases and labels intended to place them in the most negative light. The best recent example of this is the Republican rechristening of the estate tax as the 'death tax.' But it's an equal opportunity game. And both sides will lean on reporters not to start using these self-serving labels as straightforward descriptions of the issues being discussed.
It was in this vein that the National Republican Congressional Committee sent out a memo last Monday claiming, inter alia ...
Democrats are doing all they can to blur the very important distinction between 'personal accounts' and 'privatization.' They are employing the word 'privatization' for the specific purpose of eliciting negative reactions among seniors because it carries connotations of dismantling the publicly run Social Security system. 'Privatization' is a false and misleading word insofar as it is being used by Democrats to describe Republican positions on Social Security.Despite this, some reporters -- even some national reporters -- continue to inaccurately describe the concept of personal accounts as privatization. To the extent that reporters are wittingly or unwittingly complicit in the Democrat strategy to make 'personal accounts' and 'privatization' one in the same, they are using the power of the press to promote inaccurate Democrat spin and taking sides in the midterm elections.
Reporters have historically rejected partisan spin phrases as descriptors of policy proposals. They have done this because semantics matter. In the past, reporters have not used inaccurate or politically loaded descriptions in reporting because it violates a critical component of the journalistic code of ethics - reporters must distinguish between advocacy and news reporting. That is precisely the reason that most newspapers use 'estate tax' as opposed to 'death tax' and 'minimum wage' instead of 'living wage.'
It is very important that we not allow reporters to shill for Democrat demagoguery by inaccurately characterizing 'personal accounts' and 'privatization' as one in the same.
Woodruff's question to Gephardt a few days later was clearly in response to this memo and a broader Republican campaign to mau-mau reporters out of using the word 'privatization' in this context.
No two ways about it: this argument couldn't be more stupid or dishonest. Why it's not one of Tim Noah's Whoppers of the Week I'm really not sure.
You can make a pretty good case that 'privatization', or more specifically 'partial privatization', is just objectively the most accurate description of Republican policy -- that is, diverting about a fifth of Social Security's funding base into private accounts for individuals.
But why bother with mere objective accuracy, especially since 'objective' descriptions are going to be hard to come by on such a charged issue? Why not just go with the word Republicans have always used? The simple truth is that 'privatization' has always been the word Republicans themselves used to describe their policy. That is, it was until they rather belatedly realized that their policy was killing them with voters.
Examples? My god, where to start? Grover Norquist, American Spectator, June 1998: "With $14 billion of the surplus, Congress could give every working American $100 in his own IRA. Americans will then be able to compare their return on their IRA with their negative rate of return on Social Security and this will highlight the case for partial privatization." In June 1999, again in the Spectator, Norquist lauded Steve Forbes' plan for "privatization of Social Security" and said Forbes had "convinced many Republicans that the flat tax and privatization were fit for polite company." Or conservative Washington Times columnist Donald Lambro, April 27th, 1998: "Mr. Moynihan's plan [essentially the plan noted above] would move toward partial privatization." Or Fred Barnes in The Weekly Standard, April 6th, 1998, again referring to the plan noted above: "[T]he White House may be ready to accept partial privatization as the price of a reform deal..." Bill Kristol, George Will, Larry Kudlow (just the ones I looked up) and probably every other conservative under the sun has long described the move to private accounts as privatization.
So friends and foes of the policy have always called it 'privatization' or 'partial privatization.' Now the term (and the policy, for that matter) is a political loser. So Republican operatives are cooking up lies to get themselves off the hook. Everyone has to change the name. And if they don't, they're biased against conservatives.
What reporter would be foolish enough or sorry enough to fall for this? I guess we'll have to wait and see.
--Josh Marshall
